The Best Slack Hacks for Marketers

Slack is dominating its crusade against email. In fact, Slack has cut internal email use in half for businesses using the platform. But email isn’t the only industry Slack is turning on its head. Marketing as a whole is changing.

For my team, email has hit absolute zero internally, but the value we get from Slack goes far beyond team communication, private discussion, and business to business deals. We’ve automated huge portions of social media management, website analytics, design, KPI reporting, and even sales using Slack.

Since its launch in 2013, Slack has opened its doors to developers to create tools and resources that claim to automatically simplify, streamline, track, import, optimize, update, and [insert digital marketing buzzword] everything.

I’ve trimmed the fat from the long list of resources out there into a curated list of the best slack hacks for marketers. We’ll cover three sections:

Not a reader? Well you’re in luck, because we put together this video just for you!

What is a Slack Hack?

A Slack Hack is, according to my very official definition, anything that makes your coworkers say “Dang, how’d you do that?” More formally, a Slack Hack is anything that makes you more productive as a marketer, an employee, and a person. That may be a bit dramatic, but once you dig into this list, you’ll realize just how powerful a tool Slack really is.

There are 5 main categories of Slack Hacks:

Slack Commands: Automated triggers and keyboard commands built into Slack, by Slack.

Slack Hack Basics: 9 Simple Hacks You Need to Know

Slack Commands

Just as Google’s many keyboard shortcuts can drastically improve your productivity working with Google Apps, Slack provides an easily accessible list of commands to help you move seamlessly within slack.

1. Access all commands with one simple keyboard command:

Mac: Command + /PC: Ctrl + /

2. /giphy & 4 hilarious gif commands

Slack is all aboard the .gif train, as all marketers and PPC advertisers should be. With about 1 minute of setup, you get a random gif generator right inside Slack that uses popular gif search library Giphy. Simply follow the installation tutorial below, and start a new message in Slack with /giphy {Search Term} and a random .gif will appear.

Slackbot Customization

5. Program Slackbot to Become a Wizard and Answer Company FAQ’s

So, I went to Setting > Customize Slack > Slackbot to create a new triggered response every time a [keyword] appears. Be sure to use fairly unique phrases as keywords. You don’t want Slackbot triggers to be distracting to you and your team. Here’s how I conquered the company color problem:

I sure can, Todd, because it’s super easy and makes me look like a wizard.

Key Settings & Features

6. Custom Emojis

Slack ❤’s Emojis. You can use them to react to messages, comment on files, and even as an effective marketing tactic. Most important, Slack lets you upload your own custom emoji.

To create your own, simply:

Click your team in the upper left hand

Click Customize Slack

Download a Slackmoji or upload a square Image no larger than 128px/128px

Type :[Emoji Name]: in your message

7. Text Formatting

8. Favorite Messages

Why it’s important: your Favorite Messages tab to keep track of answers to recurring questions, as a to-do list, or to hold onto key company milestones. If you’re using the free version of Slack, favorite messages will be kept forever.

9. Message Settings

Edit, Delete, Save For Later, Add an emoji reaction, or pin your message to the channel:

How: Next to each message sent and received, you are given the following options:

Your sent messages:

Received messages:

The message setting menus provide a number of options to change, remove, or highlight a certain message. These are key features for making sure that you communicate effectively in slack.

Thankfully, apps like Hootsuite and Buffer allow us to share content across platforms. But managing things like mentions, customer service requests, article shares, forum opportunities, and competitor activity is a full-time job.

That’s where Notify comes in. Not only will it track direct mentions of your brand, like an @AdHawk mention or reply on Twitter, it will find any use of your keywords across channels, making sure nothing falls through the cracks. Here’s a quick snapshot of our feed:

Alerts – create custom events for when a certain number of conversions or users are reached during a specific time frame. This is awesome for benchmarking goals:

Statsbot provides the most value to us by answering momentary questions like how many users we had yesterday and where they came from. This keeps us from getting sucked into Google Analytics multiple times a day, allowing us to focus on Marketing first, then measuring. Set up here.

Growbot tallies Kudos, PlusPlus tallies points, and you can probably guess what Props gives. All three take a lighthearted approach to giving recognition to team members on a job well done and track historical performance. Naturally, this type of scoreboard will create some competition (in fact, Props can broadcast the shoutout on network televisions). Keep it friendly! Otherwise, these bots can do more harm than good for team morale.

Your team already knows you’re a hero from Basic Hack #5 above. But to solidify your seat at the Slack Throne, you’ll want to use this slack hack to generate a notification for your sales team each time you receive a hot lead.

Key Results: Hit your Sales reps over the head with qualified leads.
Automatically qualify leads based on customizable metrics like company size, lead’s role, more.
Miss fewer good leads who use a non-work email account.

5. Instantly schedule meetings that work for everyone’s calendar via Meekan for Slack

Meekan matches everyone’s calendars and quickly finds common free times. Simply add Meekan robot to a channel and ask for a new meeting. Meekan also handles rescheduling, conflicts, and calendar reminders all within Slack. Talk about a super-powered slack hack.

10. Not the Slackbot integration you Deserve, but the Slackbot integration you Need – Zapier

Is your favorite service or application stuck in 2015 and not integrated with Slack?

Have no fear, Zapier is here!

Not only can Zapier communicate with Slack on behalf of almost all your favorite apps (500 apps), it provides a number of custom “zaps” or communication recipes that can handle a wide range of tasks. It’s worth poking around with their multi-step Zaps to see what Zapier can do to give your Slack channel a facelift.

Matthew Guay, Marketer at Zapier, recommends using the Zapier’s scheduling tool to control app updates to a certain time of day – so you’re not getting dinged and pinged by Slack’s abrasive KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK whenever your apps do something.

Other popular integrations:

Are there other services that you and your business live by? There’s probably a Slack integration for that. Slack integrates with crucial components of your day to day like:

2 responses to “The Best Slack Hacks for Marketers”

I’m using Slack for over a year now and it’s great. We use integrations with Trello, and other task management and productivity tools. If I have a problem with Slack it’s all about the tons of content shared by my team on a daily basis. A lot of links with interesting content but no time to read it all, and eventually it gets lost on channel.

Having that in mind we’ve created Catch Up, a powerful integration with Slack that will store you the must read content shared by all your team. It’s not only a link aggregator as it uses Machine Learning algorithms to serve the relevant content to each user, taking into consideration their favorite type of articles and their relationship with the person who shared a specif link.

It also comes with a bot that will give you, in context, the top articles you’ve missed. The bot is also able to store links on command and to serve you the top or new content based on your questions.

We’ve just rolled this out and it would be great to have your feedback on it.